Less than two weeks after the announcement by Sony Ericsson of the support of Sony’s Locationfree for UIQ, Sling Media shows off compatibility of their wireless personal video broadcasting gadget (the Slingbox) for our Symbian 3G or Wifi enabled smartphones. After the jump you will find a pretty cool video of a W950 playing the different TV channels and DVD’s of, and controlling, a remote setup. [Via Techeblog and Engadgetmobile]

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The Spanish Television and Press Graphic Reporters Association (accronym banned) has awarded the K800 the distinction of the Best Cameraphone of 2006, as an outstanding product that helps the professional photographer optimize his job.

In the United Kingdom, Sony Ericsson has also been awarded by consumers with the Best Manufacturer Of The Year award, the Best Mobile Phone Of The Year award to the K800 —which also was voted the “Readers’ Dream Phone“—, and the Best Music Phone award to the W810.

Finally, the German edition of the Connect magazine granted, with readers’s votes, the awards of Best Cameraphone to the K800 (45,2% of the votes, and the apparently-not-so-old K750 being in third place), Best Music Phone to the W810 (with 59,9% of the votes), Best 3G Phone to the W900, and Best PDA Phone to the P990 (hmm…).

To summarize, Sony Ericsson nowadays seems to be losing the “best phone with wheels and facial hair” category only, or whatever. Unstoppable! [Via Spanish Press Release]

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Sorry, third-parties, all JAVA-enabled Sony Ericssons now have official support from Microsoft to run their new Windows Live Messenger Mobile application. MSN/Windows Messenger site Mess.be found this goodie in a chineese MSN website. Well, actually, functionality may be a little below some other JAVA clients, but if you’re like me and only need your contact list and being able to chat with some few emoticons, you’ll take this Windows Live themed instant messenger over anything else. Apparently these download links (be careful to chose the version for your model) are completely legal and free to download, but after a couple of months they will stop working unless you pay a small unknown monthly fee. Hmm, let’s just enjoy it in the meantime and we’ll talk again in January. Check some screenshots of it running on K800 inside this entry. [Via Mess.be].

For Sony Ericsson J300, K300, K310, K500, K510, Z520 and Z530, Download Windows Live Messenger Mobile 380

For Sony Ericsson K610, K700, K750, W550, W600, W700, W710, W800, W810, W850, Z550 and Z710, Download Windows Live Messenger Mobile 382

For Sony Ericsson K790, K800, S700, W850 and W900 (it should also work for Symbian smartphones), Download Windows Live Messenger Mobile 384

If your exact model number isn’t listed here, make sure your phone supports JAVA and then download the version of models using the same screen pixel size.

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UPDATE: Download links working again

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Straight out from the French Riviera, Noreve offers a series of high quality leather cases for almost all current mid-high Sony Ericssons, for those who don’t mind losing some portability in favor of protecting the precious device inside while adding a touch of style and personalization with the many leather colors available. I say losing portability because after trying these with my P990, it just won’t fit any comfortably in trousers any tighter than 50 Cent’s. It shouldn’t be a big problem for smaller models’ users though —the P990 itself isn’t very pocket-friendly anyway—, but it’s fair to say that these cases add considerable bulk to your phone, not to mention if you even attach the huge belt clip. This belt clip led McCoy, reviewer of the black M600/W950 and red P990 cases, to find a funny problem with the back screw, which you can check in the video (in all Superhandz style) after the jump, along with photos of those and my black and white P990 cases.

Go to Noreve’s Sony Ericsson leather cases product page

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Sony’s LocationFree concept makes it possible to stream your own living room’s TV to a PSP, a PC, and now your P990 too, through the (required) LF-PK1 LocationFree Base Station (pictured in the middle) that connects on one side to your TV and on the other one to your broadband network connection, to which you access from your remote device (through WiFi or 3G) no matter where you are. The press release claims that the Location Free Player for P990 is included in the default Memory Stick or can be downloaded from Sony Ericsson’s site (I haven’t found it in neither places though). What is particularily cool about LocationFree is that you can do way more than just watch TV. You can access virtually any device that can be connected to a TV: a videocamera for one-way videoconferencing or surveillance, a DVD player, a PlayStation… Okay maybe not the latter.

On my other point, back in March, Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld was in everyone’s mouths feeds and that’s the reason I made the Adriana at the time. But have you heard of this technology at all since then? I haven’t. Is the release of LocationFree for P990 another case of showcasing all the (latent) potential of SE’s flagship, or an attempt to distract us from the lack of DVB-H development news? Probably both.

Read the Press Release “Sony Ericsson’s P990 goes LocationFree”
Read Cnet’s Review of the LF-PK1 LocationFree Base Station

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May is going to be unexpectedly exciting with two Sony Ericsson product presentations on the 11th and 18th of that month, the second one being “the sh**”, an internal source confirmed (the Handycam?). In the meantime, you can print out this couple of PDF’s and make it your bathroom reading matter for some weeks [Thanks Djraven for the links]:

K800 Whitepaper (includes complete comparison table with K750):

Bluetooth PAN to connect the phone to Internet using Bluetooth.

Image formats
VGA (640x480 pixels)
1 MP (1280x960 pixels)
2 MP (1632x1224 pixels)
3 MP (2048x1536 pixels) or
3 MP (2000x1500 pixels) with image stabilizer on.

- Photo key (upper/right): Camera mode: Camera scenes or Video Night mode / Standby mode: Camera album.
- Photo key (lower/left): Camera mode Camera or Video shoot mode / Standby mode: The most recent taken picture showed in full view.

Support [amont known others] for WMA music files and WMV and RealVideo video files.

UIQ 3.0 Product Description:

[Transition effects] A menu that slides on to the screen, instead of simply appearing on the screen, is an example of a transition effect; an icon that gradually blends in to the background and then disappears is another example. (…) UIQ also supports semi-transparent windows, which enables UI elements, like menus and dialogs, for example, to have rounded corners or to let the screen area behind the window shine through. (…)

The Memory Manager handles low memory internally. It asks background applications to gracefully close down in order to free up memory. No data or settings are lost since all applications save data before closing. (…)

UIQ supports both bitmap fonts and Unicode True Type fonts. (…)

Categories to organize contacts; a contact can belong to one or several categories. (…) Backup and restore functions for all the entries [contacts] to and from external memory cards. (…) If the end user has installed an Instant Messaging (IM) application that use the Instant Messaging Integration API (…) the end user can see status and presence information in the Contacts application and use a direct navigation link to the IM application.

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Half the space of the 64mb memory card bundled with the P990 will be filled with 11 secondary applications that will complement the more essential ones like QuickOffice, that will come installed in the phone’s memory. According to Sony Ericsson’s Developer site, many of them are “try and buy” versions with time or feature limitations, but are we complaining? Some of the most interesting are:

Scanning Dictionary (in the photo): Much in the manner of the built-in Business Card Scanner (tested here), this program uses the P990 2 megapixel power to tell you the meaning of any word you point in the captured image of a text.

HandyDay, HandySafe, HandyExpense and SlovoEd dictionary: If you are a current or former Pxx0 user, you probably know Epocware and some of their must-install tools for Symbian smartphones. Even if you just used HandyDay to lock the screen .

WorldMate: Another top-selling Pxx0 application that provides critical travel-related information like workd clocks, flight schedules, unit conversions, weather forecasts, etc.

Advanced Call Manager: Who hasn’t ever needed some sort of “black list” of contacts to prevent from calling you?

Read the full list in “P990 Memory Stick preload application gallery” [Thanks zapatitos for the tip]

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We missed this CeBIT report on time, but Olav from Esato.com did a pretty good job posting (big) photos and first-hand impressions of the new Sony Ericssons (and others) from Hannover:

Entry level phones J100, K310, K510, W300/Z530 and W810 [?]: Weighting only 70g makes [the J100] the lightest model ever by Sony Ericsson. (…) An untrained eye could have misstaken the Sony Ericsson K310 with a K700. (…) I was told the new M2 cards could be used with an adapter in older Sony Ericsson models.

Hands on Sony Ericsson M600: This is an exciting new feature found in M600, W950 and P990. The new spell checker. Once you start writing a word, the M600 list the best suggestions. The list of suggested words is based on the sentence content as well as word grammar. Very cool.

P990 showing very cool features: Joseph started typing “Dear ” using the stylus with handwriting recognition. The P990 responded with inserting “Sir” as a suggestion to the next word in the sentence. After clicking on “Sir”, a space was automatically inserted, and the next word “and” was typed. To finish off, P990 suggested “Madam” as the final word when this was typed in “Dear Sir and “. It did not need the “M” to suggest “Madam”. Impressive.

Sony Ericsson K800: The two buttons you see above the display is short cuts to common settings when capturing photos. The give you direct access to scenes and shoot modes

Hands on Sony Ericsson W950: The W950 should be equipped 4GB memory. The file explorer reveals that this prototype only have 64MB installed.

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I waited until I got it shipped because I wanted to see if it lived up to its promises, and it certainly does! If you need a 1 or 2gb USB pendrive, but already have that amount of storage in your Sony Ericsson, this is for you: it just turns your memory card into a USB 2.0 plug and play mass storage device! And the best way to load MP3’s, of course. Okay, maybe not a technology wonder, but it’s as small as it can get, sleek, really fast and it’s price is a joke. How else can you get a gigabyte flash drive for less than 3 dollars?

NOTE: I’m not the seller nor do I get commission or anything, I just LOVE it

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Their photos are so good, and make the K790/K800 screen look so awesome, we wish they weren’t the size of an M2 card. But anyway Jorgen shares his love for the new products; a feeling I’m pretty sure is common around Die Messe.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the first real camera phone. Granted, Nokia’s N90 came close - but at 3.2 Megapixels and with stunning picture quality, the Sony Ericsson K800i blows the competition out of the water (…) One word: splendid. (…)

Although bested by the 8 GB Samsung SGH-i310, [the W950’s] 4 GB of flash memory should allow for considerably longer battery life - and despite its spacious storage and superb screen, the handset remains ultra-slim at 15 mm thick. (…)

Few phones harbour the kind of functionality offered by the P990i. The swiss army knife of business phones, it couples a luscious, high-resolution touch screen with a 2 Megapixel camera for video calling in conjunction with 3G as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for shorter-range options. Unfortunately, its thumbboard is a tad on the cramped side, but for the power user who needs every feature under the sun it’s a winner. Did we mention the Opera 8 browser also does landscape mode? Genius.

Read “The best of Sony Ericsson at CeBIT 2006″ at Infosyncworld

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After 2 months of daily usage, a mobile phone is reviewed the way it matters. And although Mr. Murtazin finds some ergonomy problems, in the end he can’t do but praise the future king of smartphones. Here are the most interesting quotes:

Could [you] use the dictaphone while making calling? (…) you won’t be allowed to use it in call mode, what you’ll be warned of. What was on the developers’ minds when they disabled this function is a mystery to me, since it works fine in any mode in the other handsets of the company (…).

In case you’ve declined an incoming call, the phone offers you to create a reminder of the missed call and a corresponding event. And at that it automatically fills in “Name” and “Number” fields (…).

Reject SMS. (…) you can make up an SMS template, that will be sent to the caller after you decline his call. A very useful feature – in order to send the message just presses the middle key and accept delivery (…).

One can effectively apply player of W950 to P990, as well as music cataloguer, the only sticking point here is when it becomes available separately from the device (…).

All applications are adjustable in terms of individual security settings, like file system access permission, message service usage, Internet and so on. (…)

The ergonomics of the device became worse, as compared to the previous models of the series, and giving JogDial up is an outrage upon humanity (…). Pros of the model are UIQ 3.0 software and pretty good realization of some functions – owing to these, it’s a pleasure to use P990 from day to day.

Read Mobile-reviews P990 review Part IV

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Now that we’ve added all the official photos to the W950 and K610, here’s the first batch of photos of our live coverage of Sony Ericsson’s party at the 3GSM Barcelona. A too-dark-for-great-photos event where 15-20 Sony Ericsson representatives wore W950’s around the neck, each, and where the music was played by a well known DJ Judge Jules from several Walkman Sony Ericssons! The new smatphone’s innovative keypads proved to be totally useable, with the M600’s actually having two presses per key (one for each letter, right press or left press) thus working as a proper Qwerty keyboard, and the W950’s being something not dissimilar to Motorola’s RAZR keypad, in a rubbery, more stylish way, yet very comfortable to use; whose color/graphic design they’re not all happy with, and might be changing before it goes on production, we were told. The negative point in the evening was to discover that only one P990 was hanging around with a really slow interface because the damn thing is still under development (smells like P800 spirit).

Here are other links to live galleries of the new phones:
- Phone Scoop live pics and W950 interface video, showing what lead the guys to the conclusion that the new Walkman “could be one of the most innovative mobile music experiences out there, even more so than the iPod”. [Thanks Eric]
- Mobile-review’s live pics, only in Russian for now, and showing the J100 we have not forgot about.
- Newmobile.nl’s live pictures gallery and videos.
- Mobileburn’s W950 live photos.

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How long have we been dreaming about this? It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s for real, Sony Ericsson has finally made a Bluetooth Stereo Headset in the shape of a couple in-ear headphones and a main unit with a display and keys for volume, track skipping and call answering, all weighing just 27 grams. Yes, there’s still some wires involved, but the main unit hangs lightly around the neck and the phone is in the pocket with no strings atached. The sound quality promises to be as outstanding as the HPM-70, and the battery life is not awful bad at up to 6 hours talk time or playback time, and 300 hours standby. Now here’s something interesting, if you check the compatibility list in its Official Page, isn’t every single Bluetooth phone since the S700 listed? Half the phones there didn’t support the A2D profile for stereo Bluetooth music streaming, did they? UPDATE: They corrected the list, now only the ones with A2DP (P990, M600 and W950 to date) are supported. The price is yet to be announced, but I really don’t care; when it comes out in Q2, I’m getting it no matter what. [Thanks Emil for the quick post]
Read the Press Release

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Still no press releases or photos available in Sony Ericsson’s websites, but along with the W810 announcement they emailed to UCSE, they presented these couple of cool speaker sets, one more portable-ish, one more desktop-ish, to go with the known MDS-70 (which, numbering-wise, should sound better?). The MPS-60 is really really small and pocketable, at 30x55x42 mm, while the MDS-60 measures 54x120x200 mm. They will be available in the first quarter of 2006 at unknown price and in colors Silver, White and Orange.

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Without any sign of the excitement I would show if I could have the chance of reviewing a precommercial P990, Mobile-review covers some of the aspects of the interface and basic applications in Part III of their review (previous parts’ comments). Oddly, almost half the screenshots are actually from a P800 and P910, apparently because the features of the shown applications haven’t changed. Or something… Well the last paragraph sounds like they’re going to update those with P990 screenshots soon. Whatever. To summarize the important stuff, first of all, the Nine Ninety supports the Bluetooth A2D profile!!! Awesome! (and you KNOW what that means, don’t you?). Secondly, they say it doesn’t support Voice over IP, but I’m gessing they mean it doesn’t support it out of the box: some third party developers must be working on that at the moment. And last but not least, the MP3 player application looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? And you can browse music by playlists and tags OR by folders and filenames (about time). I wonder if that CD icon surrounded by a frame in the black blank space in the middle means support for album art. They’ll cover the camera interface in some Part IV.

Steve Litchfield at AllAboutSymbian had the great idea to preview the UIQ 3 interface not through another early-firmware precommercial P990, but with an UIQ 3 Software Development Kit (Beta) and its emulator, which you can download and test by yourself. Now this is a good read. We’ll like that “when you close the flip of the P990, the user interface barely changes, with on-screen furniture simply rearranging to cope with the fact that there are slightly fewer pixels”. It is mentioned that the 5-way Jog Dial was removed because “showed that almost none knew about or used this” (minority of tech freaks in SE’s smartphones target group), and in exchange we now have a “back” hardware button below the 3-way Jog Dial and another button in the screen. Don’t miss his conclussion: “So is UIQ 3 a killer interface worth changing smartphones for? Not really, most of the changes are either incremental improvements, fixes for stuff that didn’t make sense in the previous version, or UIQ playing catch-up with Nokia’s Series 60 and Series 80″. (Ouch) “Having said that, UIQ version 3 is way, way better than UIQ 2.1 and will play an important part, alongside Symbian OS 9 under the hood and the well known hardware improvements, in making the upcoming Sony Ericsson P990 a genuinely outstanding smartphone.” (Allright). [Thanks LAU and James for the tips]

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